Koo to Shut Down Four-Year-Old Service After Takeover Talks Fail

Koo — an Indian startup that launched in 2020 as a competitor to Twitter (now known as X) — is closing down. The company, founded by Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka four years ago, will shut down after acquisition talks with “many larger internet companies, conglomerates, and media houses” fell through, according to the app’s founders. Koo was one of several companies that tried to create alternatives to U.S. internet services in India by serving users in local languages.

Koo Founders Announce Closing

In a LinkedIn post on Wednesday, Koo founders Radhakrishna and Bidawatka said Koo would be shutting down after acquisition talks with “many larger internet companies, conglomerates, and media houses” fell through. A TechCrunch report in February claimed Koo was in talks to be acquired by Dailyhunt, a news and content aggregator based in Bangalore.

The founder also said that “several” companies that were in talks with the company “changed priorities right before we signed the deal” and “most of them didn’t want to deal with user-generated content and the untamed nature of a social media company.”

Koo had about 10 million monthly active users and 2.1 million daily active users at its peak. The app has grown in popularity—bolstered by government endorsements and adoption—as Twitter and the Indian government clashed over content takedown requests. In 2022, Koo crossed the 50 million-user mark and said it aims to surpass Twitter’s user base in India within a year.

Another factor that affected the company’s growth was the prolonged funding winter that has also affected several other startups around the world. Radhakrishna notes that Koo needed five to six years of “aggressive, long-term, and patient capital” to grow its user base to a significant scale before generating revenue.

According to Radhakrishna, the decision to shut down Koo was made because the cost of running a social app was too high. Koo made its algorithms public in 2022, and the founders now say they will also consider turning the service into a “digital public good to enable social conversations in native languages ​​around the world.”